Automatically, Toffee followed instructions. She grasped the wheel with both hands and pulled to the right. The car swerved, crashed over a flower bed and headed for the lawns. There, pawing turf like a reversed bull, it described a wide circle and started back for the drive. Toffee waved elatedly to Marc over her shoulder. "Now I've got it!" she cried. "It's easy!" Apparently, she did not realize that she had learned to drive backwards, that there was another way of directing the mechanism. Racing the car to the area in front of the garage, she whipped it around down the drive again. She looked up at Marc. "Jump as I come past!" she yelled. "Who is that?" Julie shrieked, finally recovering her voice. "Answer me! Marc Pillsworth, stay right where you are!" "Jump!" Toffee yelled. "Now!" Marc landed on the seat beside Toffee and felt himself borne, as if by the wind itself, down the drive. The band swung into a booming arrangement of "Don't Give Up The Ship!" as, hind bumper first, they skidded into the street and sped away.... CHAPTER IV The towers of the Wynant Hotel, a snobbish establishment whose austere front hulked over the general public with stoney aloofness, marked the center of the city. Within, the Wynant shed upon its cowed clientele all the warmth and home-like comfort of a walk-in freezing unit. The personnel had obviously been trained to regard the paying guest as a fraud, a vandal and a momentary fugitive from social and moral levels so low as to be mainly inhabited by gophers. As to decor, the Wynant had permitted itself only a single divergence from the completely austere. In the center of its vast foyer there was a fountain and pool, topped with the marble figure of a woman in the final stages of dishabille. The lady in question, however, was of a classic pedigree and, therefore, her condition of undress was permissible; one was allowed to look upon her classic charms without fear of suspicion from the bellhops. If the guests of the Wynant, who stayed there mainly for the dubious purposes of prestige, felt a certain affection for the lady of the fountain, it was because she, in her classic security, was accomplishing for them the very thing they had always longed to do themselves; she had presented herself solidly in the very center of the Wynant and caused an area of dampness thereupon. It did not matter that the lady clutched her nakedness to her in a fit of modesty; the guests of the Wynant knew what she really had on her mind and loved her for it with a devout intensity.